Posted
by
michaelon Wednesday February 07, 2001 @02:21PM
from the such-as-pixellatedgraphics.com dept.

pallotta writes "The privately owned Norwegian domains http://ps2.no and http://playstation2.no are threatened with legal action by Sony. They ask the owners of the sites to give up the domain names or (in a letter to the owner of ps2.no) "If we do not receive your letter of confirmation within 10 February 2001, SCEE (Sony Computer Entertainment Europe) reserves its rights to bring an action against you to recover the said domain name". Full article in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten can be found here (in English)."

Anyway, now that the 275-kilo (roughly) gorilla has stepped in, it looks like, there is no hope for him unless he/she/them/they get creative.

If "Playstation2" is registered as a trademark in Norway, then the "playstation2.no" domain is a given -- Sony will get it and there is no recourse. However, for the "ps2.no" domain, there might be some hope; I somehow doubt that PS2 is a registered trademark as IBM was marketing a PC called the "PS/2" long ago. I realise that is is a lame argument, but you take what you can get.

So when does IBM [ibm.com] sue Sony [sony.com] over the "PS/2" designation? I am sick of large corperations acting like they have exclusive rights over everything. This is right on par with Apple [apple.com] stopping an Aqua-like interface for the open source community, after basing their most recent OS on and open source OS. Take, take, take.

I think all 3 letter top level domain names should be considered public domain. Most of the companies with 3 letter names are simply letters standing for the full name, ie: ps2, IBM, AMD. odds are pretty good that somebody would string these 3 letters together eventually anyway in an attempt to get an easy to remember URL. If anything big companies like sony should offer to buy out instead of bullying these people.

I've just tried 6 ps2.xxx domains, of those 6, the following are not sony sites.

ps2.net
ps2.dk
ps2.org

Also, to add to an earlier post, somebody said that if sony registered ps2 as a trademark in Norway, then they would have rights to the domain, does this mean that if a domain I wanted badly, that was owned by some other hobbyist, that I could claim his domain by registering a trademark of the same name in his country?

This should not be allowed, and I really hope that sony do NOT get to use the ps2.no domain

I do hope however that bad publicity for sony causes their sales to drop.:)